New Technology Helps Scientists See How Brain Stores Memories

scientists are taking helping of New imaging technologies to unlock secrets about the human brain and how it functions. One of those technologies is the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, fMRI. An fMRI allows researchers to ‘see’ and monitor changing blood flows in the brain as subjects perform different activities.

From Drop Box

The functional magnetic resonance imaging machine is helping scientists gain new insight into how the human brain works
The functional magnetic resonance imaging machine is helping scientists gain new insight into how the human brain works
Researcher Christine Smith from the University of California at San Diego used an fMRI to look at how the brain stores memories. She says the fMRI has been a powerful tool for learning about memory

“If you damage the hippocampus, you get classic amnesia where you have trouble remembering new things,” Smith says.

To study memory, Smith put subjects into an fMRI and then asked them to answer questions about news events over the past 30 years. She found that as people answered questions about more recent events, different parts of the brain – including the hippocampus – responded differently. The difference depended on how old the memory was.